


Long before we both thought the same thing

by becka



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Pining, X Factor judging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:38:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/becka/pseuds/becka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis and Niall discuss X Factor judging as a career path, and they both give it a try. But mostly Niall has a lot of unresolved feelings that need a resolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long before we both thought the same thing

**Author's Note:**

> I decided I needed to post some Nouis for the auspicious occasion of Louis's birthday, but a lot of this was written after 1D appeared on the UK X Factor this year, which may be cheating.

_Autumn 2014_

Rehearsals are done, and the crowd and the lights and the noise have all moved on, and Niall remembers this feeling, the quiet afterglow, but the angle is new. Louis puts his feet up on the judges’ table, pretending to be irreverent, but Niall knows how he feels when he looks at the stage. He feels fucking overwhelmed by his luck; Niall feels it too.

“Reckon it’ll be us here someday for real, Lou?” Niall asks.

Louis narrows his eyes and considers Niall carefully. “Don’t know if you’d be hard enough as a judge, Niall. Might just encourage all of them, even the rubbish ones.”

Niall huffs. “I’ve got high standards, I’ll have you know.”

“You encouraged me.” Louis’s still looking at him, and Niall would kick him if he could, anything to deflect a bit of that attention.

He rolls his eyes instead. “You were brilliant. Wouldn’t be here now without you, would we?”

“Wouldn’t any one of us be here without you,” Louis counters.

It’s worst when Louis seems sincere, when he’s not just showing off in interviews, answering “Niall” for all the questions. When it’s just them on their own, and Louis still picks him out like this.

“I’d be a great judge,” Niall says decisively. “You would too.”

“I’m meaner than you are though. I can tell them they’re shit. You’d be saying, Oh, yeah, try a different song, work on your control, and so on, and I’d just say, Get off the bloody stage!” Louis wouldn’t, not to kids whose dreams are as fragile as theirs were, but his imitation of Niall’s accent is so bad that Niall laughs anyway.

“Imagine me and you on the panel together. We’d do nothing but fight. We’d be the new Simon and Louis.”

“Mate, I’ve been angling for Simon Cowell’s job since day one. Imagine all that power.”

“You’ve got a lot of power already.” 

“Not like this though. This is, fuck, it’s so weird. Any of these kids could be us if Simon wants to make them that way.”

“Yeah,” Niall agrees. “They’ll have no idea what they’re in for.”

Louis tilts his head back, looking at the ceiling. “Reckon I might do this, after we’re done. If they’d have me.”

“Of course they’d have you. Who’d know more about X Factor than you?” Niall imagines him and Louis as X Factor judges, sitting at this table each week and fighting it out. It’s how most of his fantasies look, if he’s honest, Louis doing something and then him doing the same thing too, like a shadow. “We’d be great.”

“We would,” says Louis. He swings his feet off the table and stands up. “Want to grab a bite before you go home?”

“I could eat, yeah.”

Their footsteps echo as they walk off the empty soundstage.

 

_Autumn 2019_

Niall still doesn’t know how to fight with Simon Cowell, but he can see it’s a skill Louis’s honed in the course of the series. “She’s had a good run, and now it’s over,” Louis’s saying. “She’s done her quirky folk thing for three weeks, and she can’t do anything else, and now she needs to go.”

“Did you actually listen to her up there tonight?” Simon replies. “She’s just starting to come into her own as a performer. What if we’d binned you off the first week for having no range? We’d be sorry now.”

“I think you’d find you wouldn’t, actually,” says Louis savagely. “You’d have gone on and found someone else and been fine. And even if Lorna’s going to suddenly blossom two weeks from now, we can’t keep her on for that. She makes every song she does sound alike.”

Niall’s just a guest judge, sitting in while Cheryl’s doing a week of reunion shows with Girls Aloud, and he’s still trying to figure out when to speak up. “I thought she was great tonight though,” he says suddenly, making them both look round. “She wasn’t doing the kind of song she likes, and she was singing her heart out anyway. If she can do that, she can do anything.”

“Thank you, Niall,” says Simon. “So as I was saying about Night and Day, they’ve got great energy, but ultimately you need more than that to continue at this stage.”

“I totally agree,” says Kelly. “If they practise and tighten up their act, they could be great, but they’re just not there right now.”

Louis looks absolutely murderous, and Niall thinks maybe he’s even worse at arguing with Louis than he is at doing it with Simon because he’s shrivelling up inside under Louis’s gaze. He wants to take it back, but now it’s three to one, and Niall doesn’t want to go to deadlock on it. So he stays firm, and helps them send home three perfectly nice lads from Essex. It’s tough, but he still doesn’t think he’s wrong.

Afterwards, with the cameras off and the audience filing out, Louis says, “I didn’t think you’d side against me,” but he doesn’t sound angry, just incredulous.

“Only when you’re wrong, mate,” says Niall.

“I’m never wrong, Niall,” says Louis. “Not even once.”

“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten that, now that I’m not spending every waking moment listening to you talk.”

Louis elbows him in the ribs, but gently. They’re taking a year off, a sabbatical, but none of them say a break because they all know a break really means they might not be back. And they don’t want to not come back; they all agreed back in March. “It’s weird sometimes, isn’t it?” says Louis.

It’s the same thing Niall said to Harry last week, and Liam said to Niall in August, and he thinks they’ll all say it to each other again at Zayn’s wedding at Christmas. “It is,” agrees Niall. “Sometimes I miss you running your mouth.”

It’s such a fucking understatement. When you’ve been in love with someone for going on a decade, and you’re used to seeing them every day, or at least knowing you’ll see them every day again in a matter of weeks, it’s sharply painful to have nothing but texts and occasional nights out for nearly six months. Niall thinks about Louis all the time, misses him and wants to know what he’s doing and who he’s with and whether he’s happy. But he can’t say that, never could.

“Sometimes I miss you listening to me running my mouth,” says Louis. “What are you doing now? Want to get dinner or something?”

Niall wishes he could say he hesitates, but he doesn’t even think whether he has plans before he says, “Sure thing, mate.”

Niall thinks they’ll go someplace near the studio, but when Louis finishes thumbing through a list of nearby restaurants on his phone, he looks up and says, “Or we could go back to mine and order a pizza.”

“Any beer at yours?”

“Plenty between here and there.”

“Deal,” says Niall.

Louis puts in the pizza order while Niall grabs his things, and they stop at a Waitrose on the way across London for beer. It’s just like old times, and Niall feels so easy for Louis, laughing at his new stories about the other judges, watching him smile and gesture and fill up the whole car with his presence. He tries not to feel envious when Louis mentions seeing a lot of Zayn recently; Niall and Louis have never been the kind of mates who hang out like that, without a specific reason, and that’s not about to change now.

“And what about you then?” Louis asks him. “Enjoying the time off?”

Niall’s been writing songs and playing golf and going to football matches with his family, treating it like one long holiday, but he’s also been trying to think about the future. It twists him up inside, imagining a life without the other lads, but he’s getting to be a fine songwriter, and taking tips from Bressie about producing, and he thinks that sort of backstage life might be good for him in the long term. He likes the spotlight fine, but he doesn’t want it on his own, really. He tells Louis some of that, but not all, and Louis listens to him with that same interested face he used to put on in interviews when he wanted to coax Niall into saying more.

“We should try writing together again sometime,” says Louis. “Something good for the comeback record.”

Niall agrees, although he doesn’t know if it’ll work. They’ve never been able to write much without a mediator, someone to get Niall out of his head and get Louis to stay on task. But they’re older now. Maybe it would be good.

“You liking the _X Factor_?” Niall asks, picking up the beer he’d forgotten while he was talking.

“Yeah,” says Louis. “Nice to be on the other side of the table a bit. Though it’s weird as shit to know you’re doing to someone else what they did to us. It’s a lot of power.”

“Yeah, but you wanted that power.”

“Over people’s lives though.” He sounds uncomfortable, like it’s distasteful thinking about it too much. “Unless they’re completely rubbish, it’s shit telling them no. I didn’t think I’d care.”

Niall tucks his arm around Louis’s shoulders in an awkward half hug, and Louis allows it for a moment before he shrugs away. “So you bribed anyone new into dating you?” Louis asks, changing the subject.

“Nah, mate. Enjoying the single life. You?”

“Saw someone for a bit in the summer. But he got weird when I wasn’t around during the show, so I broke it off.”

He says it so fucking casually, almost proudly, as though he’s not throwing off Niall’s whole worldview. “He?” says Niall quietly.

“Yeah,” says Louis. “You’re not going to go all close-minded about that now, are you?”

“Course not,” says Niall. “You just never said. That you might like men. You never said.” He clutches his beer bottle tight, sure that his hands are shaking. He can’t remember how to breathe right. It shouldn’t matter so much if Louis’s not straight; it still doesn’t mean he wants Niall. “Lou, you know I’ve dated men, right? I remember telling you. When I was with Dylan two years ago. I told you.”

Louis looks totally blank for a moment, and that may be the worst thing, that Niall coming out was so insignificant to him that he can’t even remember it. But then he nods. “Yeah, yeah, of course. We were doing that Christmas thing. With the awful fake snow.”

“It wasn’t awful until you tried to shove a handful in my mouth.”

“It was always awful,” Louis insists. “But you said you had a boyfriend. We tried to say you were dating Tulisa, and afterwards you said we should stop saying that stuff because you were dating that bloke Dylan.” Louis’s gaze is so intent on Niall’s face, and Niall thinks he’s stopped breathing altogether. “I never knew if you were serious, or if you were just trying to get us to stop the jokes.”

“You could have asked then. You could have asked anytime and I would have told you.”

Instead of replying, Louis kisses him. His mouth is soft and open and Niall isn’t expecting it, but he leans in anyway, clutching at his bottle one-handed so he can bring the other around the back of Louis’s neck. It’s a good kiss, as good as Niall always imagined it, and when Louis pulls away Niall makes a plaintive sound at the loss. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Louis is looking at Niall’s mouth. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

Niall shakes his head. “Don’t say always. You haven’t always.” And Niall knows. Niall knows about always. And he knows in the beginning Louis barely gave him a thought.

Louis concedes. “Not always. But for a long time.” He pries the bottle out of Niall’s hand and sets it on the coffee table beside his own. Then he kisses Niall again, deeper and more certain. They end up in a sprawl on the sofa, Niall’s thighs spread around Louis’s hips as Louis bites at his mouth. He always knew Louis would bite, imagined Louis’s sharp teeth tugging at him so many nights.

They snog until the pizza arriving is a surprise, and the buzzer nearly jolts Niall out of his skin. Louis rolls off him to get the door, and when he comes back, Niall’s still laid out devastated and half-hard on the sofa. “That’s a good look on you,” Louis says, and Niall flushes with pleasure.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he eats pizza and stares at Louis’s mouth, and holds onto nine fucking years of secret longing because he doesn’t want to scare Louis off. But then Louis finishes his second slice of pizza and wipes his hands on his jeans and says, “It _was_ always for you, wasn’t it? That’s why you look like you might vom, right? Which, don’t do it, mate. I’m not in a mood to clean it up.”

Niall laughs a little because he know Louis wants him to. “It was always. It was always you. Fuck.” He puts his face in his hands. There’s so much he wants to say, so many moments he’s relived and worn thin in his own mind.

Louis touches his hand. “I’m really thick, love. You’ve got to spell it out for me.”

“You never spelled it out for me either.”

“No,” says Louis stroking his thumb along the inside of Niall’s wrist. “You’re quite right about that.”

He lets Louis take his hand, lacing their fingers together and squeezing gently. Niall squints one eye open, and Louis’s looking kind and fond and unbearable like he always has when Niall has trouble in lifts or crowds. “So what now?” Niall asks meekly.

“Reckon we could have a bit of a cuddle. If you like. You always were the best cuddler.”

“I am,” agrees Niall. “No question there.”

Louis rolls his eyes when Niall clears the table and puts the rest of the pizza in the fridge, but he knows better than to ask Niall not to tidy.

“Ready now?” Louis asks from the sofa, when the plates are in the dishwasher and there’s nothing else to do.

“Not at all.” But he folds into Louis’s arms anyway, settles against him like he’s always wanted to, Louis’s hand pressed warmly against his back under his t-shirt. He used to think Louis never really saw him, never would have cared about the stuff in Niall’s head, but he’s willing to be proved wrong now. He needs Louis to prove him wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> You can talk to me about my intense Nouis-related feelings [here](http://realmenwearpuppypants.tumblr.com/). <3


End file.
